Hannah Waters

Profile

One of Hannah Waters's earliest memories is digging up sand crabs on a Delaware beach, and she hasn't stopped digging the ocean or after answers since. Now she is a writer, editor and producer for the Ocean Portal at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She studied Biology and Latin Minnesota’s Carleton College, sneaking off to the coasts in the summertime to study seabird colonies, conserve endangered piping plovers, and help lobstermen with their traps. She loves cephalopods, imagining plankton as larger-than-life monsters, and weird adaptations.

Collaborator Contributions

Brachiopods are an ancient group of organisms, at least 600 millions years old. They might just look like clams, but they are not even closely related. Instead of being horizontally symmetrical along their hinge, like...

Great Shearwaters usually don't come near land when they're not breeding—but sometimes they can be blown ashore by strong winds and storms. When that happens, the stranded birds have to be taken to a rehabilitation center...

Discovering new species is an exciting quest, right? Well, some parts are—but after you find a cool-looking organism that you think is a new species, there's a lot more to be done. You have to confirm that it's...

Large pieces of plastic are sorted by color into large troughs. After coming in from the beach, the plastic is hosed down, soaked in biodegradable soap, and dried in the sun before it's sorted by color, size and type....

Band-rumped Storm-petrels (Oceanodroma castro) are quite a bit larger and heavier than Wilson's storm petrels, but share their amazing sense of smell, which they use to find food that may be miles away. They...